A Shrinking Island

I've become quite a fan of British detective shows over the past few years, and often default to BritBox and Acorn when I'm hunting for my next streaming binge. The Brits do a good job with them, and they know it. There's a seemingly endless supply, and while the inevitable knee-bend to diversity demands is annoying, it isn't quite as ham-fisted as that in American products. Plus, the actor pool is small enough that "oh, yeah, she was in three other shows I've binged" has become its own amusement.

Seemingly every UK television detective relies on the vast surveillance apparatus present in that realm. "Anything on CCTV?" is so common a bit of dialogue that it might as well be hot-keyed. London alone has nearly a million surveillance cameras, earning it the reputation as the most surveilled city in the world. That's one camera for every nine residents, or 105 cameras per thousand persons.

For comparison, the fifty largest American cities average 11 per thousand.

If that makes you feel better about the state of freedom of movement in America, don't smile just yet. Atlanta blows London out of the water with 124 per thousand. DC comes in second with 55 per thousand, then Philadelphia at 31, San Francisco at 25, and Denver at 20.

Since population densities vary, it's worth looking at cameras per square mile, to see if that changes anything.

Not much: DC, 574. Atlanta, 448. San Francisco, 388 Philadelphia 350. Denver drops from fifth per person to eighth per square mile. New York City, which at 9 per thousand doesn't make the top ten per capita, lands fifth per square mile at 236.

For comparison, London’s at 210.

Despite the government’s love affair with street surveillance, there appears to be little or no correlation between camera density and crime reduction. So, we aren't even trading for safety when we tolerate the growing surveillance state.

You shouldn't be surprised, then, that the government isn't satisfied with its growing physical surveillance machine. Cyber surveillance - eyeballs on our digital activities - is also a growth industry.

And one with an increasingly sinister bent.

Some may have heard about the UK police commissioner who threatened to extradite and jail Americans exercising their First Amendment-protected free speech rights if their utterances ran afoul of the UK's increasingly draconian speech restrictions.

Yes, indeed, the birthplace of John Locke, one of the earliest figures of the Enlightenment that is the foundation for our Bill of Rights and our system of limited government, has become a worse place for speech liberty than even Putin's Russia.

Meanwhile, at that den of intellectual (and gustatory and moral and perhaps libidinous) depravity known as The United Nations, a cyber-crime treaty is being considered that is so encompassing it could empower the least-free authoritarian and totalitarian nations in the world to seek international enforcement of whatever they decide constitutes "cybercrime," including speech that is protected in America.

Our leaders, the ones who have sworn to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," don't seem too distressed by this. Probably because they've already violated both the spirit and the letter of 1A in their coercive collusion with social media and internet gateway companies.

When the Constitution was drafted, there was much debate as to whether a Bill of Rights should be included. The antis were not anti-rights, they felt that the "anything not authorized is prohibited" nature of the Constitution was enough to protect our rights, and feared that enumerating some would serve to diminish others. Thank goodness the pros prevailed. It turns out that "anything not authorized is prohibited" is a message that most of our politicians and way too many of our judges either miss or ignore, so explicit language like "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" has proven both necessary and vital.

With rare exception, the liberties that Jefferson noted are unalienable are either drastically curtailed or simply don't exist in most of the world. We shouldn't be surprised by that dearth in nations that lack ties to the Enlightenment, but to see those rights erode its birthplace is frightening.

America and its sphere of influence has long been an island of liberty in a world of suppression, but that island is shrinking - from within as well as from without. Every concession we make to the surveillance state is a loss of liberty we'll never get back. Every new surveillance camera (that'll include those speeding and red light cameras, by the way) is another grain of sand eroded from liberty’s shores. Every iteration of Big Government or Big Data mining our online behaviors is another. Every new form of "identification" (facial, voice, gait recognition, speech patterns, and more) is another digital "fingerprint" taken without our consent. AI supercharges all this, mooting a large chunk of our Fourth Amendment protections by the simple act of walking down a public street. The foreign threats are overt, but our leaders aren't pushing back with even a fraction of the vehemence their oaths of office require them to.

Rights get lost by drip-drip-drip and nibble-nibble-nibble. The frog is in the pot, and the heat is on. Our government is all too happy to cite "security threats" in order to embrace the technological destruction of our rights, and that should worry everyone, no matter your political leanings. Liberal, conservative, libertarian, green - it's us against Big Government, no matter the rest of it. Only the socialists, communists, and fascists are happy about all this, and most of them are going to be gob-smacked when the machine they support and justify (inevitably) gets used against them.